Richard and Nancy Sevenoaks

The proprieters of Leake Auctions continue the family tradition of providing customers with the personal touch

Feature Article from Hemmings Classic Car

The world of collector-car auctions here in America has changed dramatically in the past 20 years. The number of auction companies that vie for the business of collectors and dealers has risen, while some of the original participants have gone away. One of those early auction houses--the Leake Auction Company, founded by Jim Leake Sr. in the 1960s--has adapted to this new reality, expanding its scope and reach, and its leaders, president Richard Sevenoaks and vice president Nancy Leake Sevenoaks, continue to help a growing customer base with a down-to-earth perspective, personal service and Southern-style hospitality.
Nancy recalls her father's lifelong love of cars: "He was a farm boy from central Oklahoma. They lived a quarter-mile from the dirt road that became Route 66, and when he and his siblings were finished with their chores, they'd go down by the Stone School to watch the cars go by. He would always say, 'One day, by gosh, I'm going to own a car just like that,' talking about a Packard or a pretty Ford or what have you.
"He and my mother met in college and married, and he went to work for her father, who was a wholesale grocer," Nancy tells us. "There were still many bad roads in the 1940s, so they had warehouses for their fruits and vegetables in many of the small towns. As the rail lines and roads were improved, they closed some of the warehouses. My father began storing old cars in them, cars that he'd pick up for a couple hundred dollars, or less. He lost storage as they sold off those warehouses in the 1960s, so Mom made him sell some of the cars in 1964; we had Parke-Bernet [which would become part of Sotheby's] come from New York to our little town of Muskogee, and they held an auction off of the back of one of the grocery flatbed trucks."
A different breed of cars that caught Jim's fancy would form the basis of the noteworthy museum--called The Antiques, Inc. Car Museum--that he ran from the late 1960s until 1987; "He loved anything with an engine in it, but he really fell in love with Rolls-Royces and early steam vehicles; he also loved the big steam farming machines. At one point, he spent $23,000 on a 1911 Rolls-Royce maharaja's car that had been used to hunt tigers! He had Hispano Suizas, Isotta-Fraschinis and Talbot Lagos, as well as traditional big iron like Packards and Duesenbergs. He also had what we called the 'Okie car,' which was a car from the 1930s 'dust bowl' era, with a mattress on top and a still inside," Nancy says with a laugh. "When he decided to close the museum in 1987, Daddy wanted to see the cars sold off, not to have them sold after his death. So we did a huge auction here in Tulsa. It was great to see--he and Mom rode across the turntable in the maharaja's car; it was very dramatic."
That first auction back in 1964 would start a tradition for the Leake family, and they began holding once-annual collector-car auctions in nearby Tulsa. "When Nancy and I got into it in the early 1970s, there was a generational change happening, from her father on down to us young folks," Richard recalls. "Now we're in our late 50s, and we see our children and our friends' children who are now 30 years old. They're bringing their likes and dislikes to the marketplace--again, there's a generation change.
"When Mr. Leake had his first sales, everything sold was pre-World War II. I remember in the late 1970s when he decided he'd hold an auction for nothing but post-war cars. That was a big deal back then, because many considered them just used cars, since the cars of the 1960s were only 10 years old at that time," he says. "That auction was a hit, and it was soon incorporated into our classic-car auction."
Richard and Nancy helped Jim with the auction through the 1980s, while they ran their own business concern as well: a television station in Tulsa. "Nancy did promotion, I worked in sales, and [current business manager] Mac Durnil worked in the back room," Richard explains. "In 1989, we got out of the television business and sold the properties. Nancy and I came to a crossroad, and we asked ourselves, what are we going to do now? We made the decision to buy the Tulsa auction from Mr. Leake, my father-in-law.
"Back then, Kruse and Barrett were the only auctions that did it full time. The others did it like we did--they had other jobs, and held an auction once a year," Richard says. "We thought we could do it: Mac could handle the business aspects, Nancy could do the marketing, and I know how to sell. We could translate our skills from television and do this full time." Nancy agrees; "We felt comfortable with it. We knew the business and we knew the people in the business. It was a natural transition."
She continues, "Richard has an antique partner's desk in his office--this meant that Daddy would sit on one side and he would sit on the other, and they'd double-team people on the telephone. Daddy wouldn't want to stop working, so he'd take a nap in the office's Barcalounger, then wake up and say, 'Oaks, let's call someone else!'"
"Mr. Leake was retired, so he and I would go out on sales calls together a few times a week," Richard recalls. "We'd fly or drive, and visit collectors together."
Nancy's father made sure that he introduced his son-in-law to as many prominent collectors and industry people as possible, knowing that personal connections would be the basis of Leake Auction Company's future success. "Remember that all of today's big guys--Rob Myers, David Gooding, Craig Jackson--all had to be introduced into the marketplace. They all worked for other people first."
The Sevenoaks have watched the collector-car auction world change dramatically in their company's tenure, as Richard notes: "There were only four or five auctions held on an annual basis, and Leake's was one of them. There was Kruse, up in Auburn, and the Kruse event that became Barrett-Jackson in Scottsdale. And you had Leake in Tulsa, which was as large or larger, until the oil bust.
"We've seen the changing of the guard in the auction world. Dean Kruse--who was holding 40 or 50 auctions a year, sometimes two a weekend--is gone, and others are filling his vacuum. Barrett-Jackson got onto television, which was a big gamble, but now they're exposed to millions of people, and they're king of the hill. Mecum has exploded into the marketplace with a well-done marketing plan of advertising and television. RM Auctions bought the Kruse site in Auburn and have entered what we'd call the mass-market. Television and the Internet have changed the whole parameters of collector-car marketing and advertising."
Although the Leake Auction Co. suffered the loss of its 85-year-old founder and namesake in 2001, the firm has grown notably in the last two decades. "We had so many people who came from the Texas area, and Richard decided that we ought to go into Oklahoma City, which has built up into a bang-up auction over there," Nancy explains. "Because we had so many Texans coming up, we decided to try Dallas...and expanded from there. Texas is a huge, huge market." Indeed, Leake now hosts five regional collector-car auctions at upscale indoor venues each year: Tulsa, Oklahoma City, San Antonio, Dallas and Houston.
"One thing about this business is that it's always changing," Nancy muses. "The younger people move in. You have to keep fresh. We don't see the cars that we sold 40 years ago on the marketplace anymore; it went from Model Ts and As to the heavy iron of the 1930s and 40s, and look at where it's gone from there."
Richard concurs: "Speculators have run up prices two or three times, but like every bubble, that has burst, so the Shelby Mustangs, Boss 429s, 1969 Camaros and 1967-'71 Mopars that have been high are starting to come back down. And then there are what I call the 'blue chip' cars, the ones that everybody knows and wants--these are the Tri-Five Bel Airs, the 1955-'56-'57 Thunderbirds, the 1963-'67 Corvettes and the 1964-'70 Mustangs. Also in that group are the 1950s Cadillacs: Collectors and museums want the 1959 Eldorado Biarritz, the 1953 Eldorado and the 1957 Brougham. These will always be popular, and you can't have enough at an auction."
Their decades at the heart of this family firm have given the Sevenoaks a wide perspective on collectible cars and on their customers: "You'll deal with the man who buys one car at a time and restores it, you'll deal with a small-business man who runs cars at different auctions, you'll deal with the most important people in the industry," Nancy tells us. "And you'll make the most wonderful friends in this business."

This article originally appeared in the May, 2011 issue of Hemmings Classic Car.